The Mainstreaming of Nikki Haley

During Saturday’s Republican presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, when Nikki Haley’s endorsement was still up for grabs, it was clear that at least two candidates wanted it. “Nikki Haley will do a better job curing poverty than Barack Obama,” said Marco Rubio. Later, Jeb Bush took a swipe at rival John Kasich, citing a think tank report that graded governors on spending. Kasich got a bad grade. Haley was among the best.

Haley was there, watching in person, but she didn’t speak to reporters. As the six Republican presidential hopefuls stomped and shouted across the state she governs, Haley said as late as Tuesday that she wasn’t even sure if she was going to endorse anyone, though it was unlikely to the be the man leading the polls, the one who had said she wasn’t doing enough to keep Syrian refugees out of the state.

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The next day, Haley broke her silence.

“We say that every day is a great day in South Carolina,” she told a crowd of hundreds at a Rubio event outside a warehouse in Chapin. “If we elect Marco Rubio, every day will be a great day in America.”

The feeling was mutual. “We’d like her help beyond South Carolina,” Rubio said during an appearance with Haley on Fox News. “She represents everything I want the Republican party to be about.”

In a normal year, the decision to back a talented candidate with a "future of the party" glow would be almost a no-brainer. This year, it felt like a toe extended into a minefield. If anyone embodies the almost existential challenge faced by Republicans in the Year of Trump, it is Nikki Haley -- the telegenic, vivacious leader who just hitched her wagon to an almost sure loser in her state.

Haley, like Rubio, is 44. She’s the youngest governor in the country, and the first woman and first Indian-American to hold the office in South Carolina. Over the last year, she has ridden what might have been a series of political catastrophes into something like triumph: she dealt with historic flooding in her state, the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer, the killings of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist, and spoke out, successfully, to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds. In January, party leadership selected her to deliver the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address. "In a year when the country is crying out for a positive vision and alternative to the status quo,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement, “Gov. Haley is the exact right choice."

But Haley’s endorsement of Rubio represents a bit of a paradox for her and her party. A governor with an approval rating above 80 percent, is bestowing her prized support on someone who might well finish in third. She is mentioned often as a vice presidential candidate, but not by the person who has led in national polls for months. She swept into office five years ago as a Tea Party favorite, an outsider ready to do battle with the old-boy network, but now despite her resolutely anti-Obamacare, pro-Second Amendment and budget hawkish views, she fights the perception that she has mellowed or that her brand of conservatism has somehow gone out of favor.

Recently, as she sat outside her office in Columbia, she was asked if her message has been distorted in this most unorthodox of campaigns.

“Completely,” she says, without hesitation.

“Republicans need to look in the mirror and say, we can’t just elect people because they look good in a picture or hold a baby well,” she says. “We’ve got to elect people who are going to do something. Who stand by their word and mean it.”

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Before her first campaign for the state house of representatives in 2004, nobody knew who Nikki Haley was. She introduced herself to voters by passing out donuts in the carpool lanes at nearly every middle school in her district. The campaign against her got dirty. Haley’s opponent in the Republican primary, a 30-year incumbent named Larry Koon, not so subtly pointed out that she registered to vote with her given name, Nimrata Randhawa. She won, and steadily rose in power in the house. But she started to fight with leadership. Haley’s effort to put legislative voting on the record ran afoul of then-House Speaker Bobby Harrell, who kicked her off a powerful committee in 2008. That’s it, Haley thought, I’m running for governor. “It’s no longer about electing Republicans,” she said in 2010, “it’s about electing conservatives.”

Again, for most of the campaign, nobody took her all that seriously. Haley was running fourth until a month before the primary. Then the Club for Growth threw its support behind her. ReformSC, an issue advocacy group that also supported outgoing governor Mark Sanford, ran $400,000 worth of favorable ads. The biggest bump came from an endorsement by former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called Haley a “pro-family, pro-life, pro-second amendment, pro-development, pro-conservative reformer,” at a rally in Columbia. Haley jumped by 21 points in some polls, enough to catapult her to first place. She eventually won the nomination in a runoff with congressman Gresham Barrett. Her most important quality, says former South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson, was her willingness to lose. “You start off with the same message and never change. If you do lose, at least you lost on principle.”

One of those principles has been a relentless public optimism. Not long after she became governor in 2011, Haley instructed state employees to answer the phone by saying “It’s a great day in South Carolina.” It was her way of giving the state a morale boost. “It’s part of who I am,” she toldTime.

The mockery started immediately. Two Democrats swiftly introduced an obviously-doomed bill that would have banned the greeting until, among other things, the state’s 11 percent unemployment rate dropped below five. But Haley plowed forward, dropping the phrase at glitzy job announcements for Boeing, Giti Tire and BMW, at speeches to Rotary clubs in Charleston, Hartsville and Georgetown, and as part of her re-election campaign in 2014. Her Democratic opponent, Vincent Sheheen, tried to use it against her. "It's a great day in South Carolina," one of his ads began, "for Nikki Haley, maybe. But not for South Carolina families."

The attack, like so many others, didn’t work. In 2010, when she first ran for governor, unfounded rumors spread about marital infidelity. Didn’t work. A state senator called Haley, who often opened her speeches by crediting her Indian parents, a “f--king raghead.” Didn’t work. In 2012, when the Social Security numbers of 3.8 million South Carolinians were stolen in a cyber attack on the state Department of Revenue, Democrats accused Haley of incompetence. Didn’t work. “The voters couldn’t figure out why that was supposed to be her fault,” says Scott Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University. In 2014, Haley was re-elected with 56 percent of the vote.

“My friends, it truly is a great day in South Carolina!” she said at her second inauguration.

Though Haley came into office vowing to fight the establishment in the legislature, she has faced a familiar problem: Thanks to South Carolina's constitution, lawmakers are much more powerful than the governor. “If you’re the governor, there’s not a lot to do,” says David Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University.

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Less willing to compromise than her predecessors, Haley has fought her battles on new terrain. If Haley disagrees with lawmakers’ votes or proposals, she’ll hit them online, where she maintains a lively social media profile. “I have called out legislators from year one,” she says. “I go to their districts and call them out. I mean, it’s what I’m known for. I put their votes up on Facebook.” Predictably, her tactics have made things tense with many lawmakers, even Republicans, who have often overridden her vetoes on the state budget. “We enjoy so much control that we become fractured within ourselves,” says State Rep. Tommy Pope of York. “I think in this structure, she could strive to find ways to bring the groups together rather than be adversarial.”

But she is winning the battle of public approval. A Winthrop poll in December put her approval at 81 percent, while the legislature got a comparatively ambivalent 54 percent.

Haley has largely focused on jobs. “Anytime a coffee shop opened its doors, she was there cutting a ribbon, and tweeting it with a hashtag #jobsgovernor,” jokes Huffmon. Lawmakers, largely, take credit for creating the low taxes and generous incentives that have lured large companies like Boeing and BMW. But many credit Haley for going the extra mile to get CEOs to bring jobs here. “I think she’s done a terrific job of selling South Carolina,” says Shane Massey, a Republican state senator from Edgefield.

In all of her discussions with business leaders, Haley said one thing never came up. “I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag,” she said during a debate in October 2014. “Yes, perception of South Carolina matters,” she continued, adding that the perception of the flag didn’t match the reality of her election. “We really kind of fixed all that when you elected the first Indian-American female governor.”